"Valkyrie"

"Valkyrie" is a minor-key thriller, a story told in whispers and behind closed doors, featuring men who know they're doomed to failure and that failure means death. "Valkyrie" is a WWII movie the way that last year's "3:10 to Yuma" was a western - both movies completely ignore practically everything iconic about their much-belabored genre, settling instead for a resolutely destylized vision (both movies feature lots of interior close-ups and fluid Steadicam movements which refuse to call attention to themselves.) Characters in both films are heroic, but in decidedly non-bullshit ways; in both films, the lead protagonist is an amputee played by a former glamour boy (Christian Bale in "Yuma" had only one leg; Tom Cruise in "Valkyrie" has just one eye and half a hand.) Both movies seem to come straight out of the 1950s, and so they'll probably look much better 50 years from now.

It's difficult to talk about "Valkyrie" without discussing the bad buzz it accrued all during 2008, most of which centered on Tom Cruise, who is still making up for a messy 2005 which proved to everyone in America that he was an insane gay fascist satanist who jumped on couches and probably stuffed gerbils up his ass. Listen, I think Scientology is totally bullshit, but I think the same thing about Catholicism, and as long as Tom Cruise doesn't make the L. Ron Hubbard version of "The Passion of the Christ," we're cool.

People tend to hate on Tom Cruise because he's weird. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of the film business in general and the acting art in particular, because every single actor is completely strange, narcissistic, preachy, egotistical, neurotic, secretly gay, and generally not the kind of person you would like to bring home to mother or even meet casually for a drink. Daniel Day-Lewis may be the weirdest person to ever exist in the universe, which is why he's able to fully inhabit his roles. "There Will Be Blood" would barely be a movie if it starred anyone other than Daniel Day-Lewis, because the whole joy of the movie centers on watching an incredibly bizarre person live and breathe onscreen, and only an incredibly bizarre person could inhabit such a role. Actors need to lie to everyone all of the time. So what if Tom Cruise believes that space ghosts live in human minds?

ANYWAYS, "Valkyrie" was directed by Bryan Singer, who somehow spent ten years making superhero movies before he got around to this one. Admittedly, all three of those movies were good in their own way - "X-Men" kickstarted the comics film revolution by virtue of its not-badness, "X2" was the first great action movie sequel of the modern age, and "Superman Returns" was such a strenuously accurate sequel-remake to the essentially forgotten "Superman 2" that it practically rivals "Grindhouse" for insanely-precise subgenre fetishism. (For a very particular kind of movie geek, the opening titles of "Superman Returns" give a long tall brain hard-on.) "Valkyrie" basically ignores that near-trilogy, and plays like the logical next step from "The Usual Suspects" and "Apt Pupil," combining the measured heist-thrill of the former with the lofty themes of the latter. Not quite awesome but absurdly watchable, "Valkyrie" indicates that Singer might become a thrillingly low-key action filmmaker along late-period Eastwood lines, so long as Warner Brothers keeps him away from "Superman Returns Returns."